People of Color can also steal…Duh?
By Patrick Hall
"Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of knowing what not to believe.”
Euripides
We should have learned that lesson in the 1960s, with the Great Society Programs and the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, which gave rise to Community Services Block Grants. These were all authored during the Johnson Administration. These Programs were at the heart of the so-called War on Poverty, which saw billions of dollars administered by the Federal government to help the poor and downtrodden. Negroes/Blacks/African Americans were especially targeted in receiving the so-called benefits of these programs. It was a valiant attempt by the Feds to uplift the many within the Negro Community because of past discriminatory practices that hamstrung many Blacks or People of Color. At the local level, many of these programs were plagued by mismanagement, fraud, and outright theft of millions of taxpayers' dollars.
To put this in perspective, sixty-one years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society Programs launched the War on Poverty. Since then, taxpayers have spent more than $22 trillion fighting Johnson’s war. This was three times the cost of all military wars in U.S. history. Last year alone, taxpayers spent more than $970 billion on 87 different anti-poverty programs.
Despite this spending, the percentage of Americans living in poverty has remained relatively unchanged since the late 1960s. President Reagan once quipped that well-meaning individuals (both Democrats and Republicans) declared war on poverty, “and poverty won.”
Once more, a good portion of monies allocated to help the poor and specifically Black Americans, what the left calls “People of Color, “ just got stolen or badly mismanaged. The Community Service Block Grants (CSBG), which gave rise to Community Action Programs (CAP), were the most controversial component of the Great Society Programs. They proposed "maximum feasible participation" by poor people themselves to determine what would help them the most. Of course, in the succeeding decades, this would open the gates to a great deal of fraud and outright theft of these Federal funds, i.e., < taxpayers' dollars>. CAP represented a radical departure from the government’s traditional approach to running most social reform programs.
Some sad but typical examples
Black folks, along with a lot of white administrators, were able to steal and/or mismanage so much of the funding back in the late 1960s and beyond. CSBG, as well as CAP, were often the vehicle employed to garnish Federal funds and use them for questionable “make-work-programs, no-show-jobs, and dubious minority youth work programs. In upstate New York, in places like Rochester and Buffalo, Action for a Better Community Programs (ABC) were perhaps the most dreadfully mismanaged. In Buffalo, a youth work program employed Black youth to clean up vacant lots in the inner city. Over fifty years ago, as a young, idealistic college student, I was assigned, along with two others, to “supervise” work groups of 15 to 20 teenagers, mostly Black, in cleaning up the garbage in these vacant lots. At the beginning of the summer, things went ok. However, by the second or third week, most black youth didn’t show up for their work assignments.
However, what they showed up for every Friday was to collect a paycheck for jobs they hadn’t performed. This went on for the rest of the summer. Complaints filed with the Directors or urban site supervisors were basically ignored. It went on this way until the end of summer. My naïve and idealistic college-student colleagues and I knew what the score was. Very few of us ever worked in these youth work programs again.
Here is a tragic sidebar. I was told by more than one Urban site supervisor that these black youth came from poor families, and it was “ok” for them to show up and collect a check. I kid you not!
In my hometown of Rochester, New York, many of the urban youth work programs were equally suspect. Monies and work opportunities were being wasted. Tragically, all those hundreds, if not thousands of Black youths learned nothing regarding good work habits and taking responsibility for themselves and their communities.
And no! It is not racist to point this out, as many Progressive Liberals want to shame or intimidate many into believing. Too many Democrats, as well as many Conservative Americans, allow themselves to be trapped in the “racial/ethnic guilt cul-de-sac,” which teaches them the dodgy if not questionable lesson of “Kill and/or abuse me, but please don’t call me a Racist!”
What some Somalis have Learned
Kayseh Magan, an investigator in the Medicaid Fraud Division of the Office of the Minnesota Attorney General, and a Somali-American himself, once opined in an unguarded moment that members of his community must cease leveraging race and religion to avoid accountability. By now, most Americans have heard or read about the massive amount of outright fraud perpetrated by over 70 community services programs operated by Somali officials in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Here is a sidenote! The same phenomena have been observed among Somali communities in both the UK and the EU.
As a quick overview, over $9 billion in taxpayer dollars were stolen or defrauded by Somalis in various social services scams.
Somali Fraud #1.
During the Covid-era between $250-$300 million was stolen by 75 Somali defendants. It all revolved around a nonprofit group or program called “Feeding Our Future (FOF). FOF claimed work with restaurants and/or catering services to distribute meals to schools and nursing homes throughout the Minneapolis area. For several years, FOF submitted fraudulent meals and invoices, defrauding federal officials and taxpayers.
Somali Fraud #2
Beginning in early Fall and accelerating over the New Year's holiday, a fraudulent housing program was discovered. So far, over a dozen people have been charged with submitting millions of dollars' worth of fraudulent or inflated bills to the Federal Government. According to Federal prosecutors, Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher and other housing-stabilization programs were susceptible to fraud because they lowered barriers to entry, thereby favoring Somalis, who had few record-keeping requirements. Prosecutors note that spending on housing programs ballooned from $2.6 million to $100 million in less than three years. At the time of this writing, at least a dozen Somalis, including two Pennsylvanians with no clear connection to Minnesota, allegedly traveled in what Prosecuting attorneys described as “fraud tourism.”
Somali Fraud #3
Since early 2025, several Somalians have been charged with stealing state/Federal monies designated to provide services to children with autism. Defendants were accused of hiring “unqualified behavioral experts,” submitting false claims to the state that indicated they worked with autistic children. Prosecutors also said that payments ranging from $ 1,100 to $ 1,500 were made to thousands of persons (not verified). One autism services defendant, Asha Farhan Hassan, and staff were also charged with running a fake food distribution site.
Joseph H. Thompson, United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota, said the autism services fraud cases were not isolated schemes. So far, at least 14 Medicaid services are under audit that were previously deemed “high risk for fraud.”
Somali Fraud #4
Nick Shirley, an independent investigator and YouTuber, drew over ten million viewers in late 2025. His reporting or videos showed him visiting federally supported child care centers in Minneapolis and finding no children present. He pointed out that more than a dozen day care centers were not providing any services. These Somali owners had been pocketing the Federal funding/taxpayers' money for years. Currently, the United States Department of Health and Human Services has frozen roughly $185 million in taxpayers' support for child care. An important aspect of the Somali Daycare case is that the defendants spent taxpayer funds on cars, property, and luxury travel. The FBI, along with the DOJ, also shows that millions of stolen funds were wired to banks and companies in China. As noted by several members of the International Trade Commission, tracing or locating all funds stolen money attributable to the CCP is an investigative “black hole.” Somali defendants also transferred nearly $4 million to accounts in Kenya as well as a questionable banking institution in Somalia, which, according to officials at both the CIA and the Department of War, has close relations to al Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab. The United States Department of War has for years designated al-Shabaab a foreign terrorist militia based in Somalia.
Have we been Omar(ed) ?
I imagine one can also pose the question, have we been Sharpton(ed), Waters(ed), or even Benjamin Crump(ed) again? This time, by Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who represents the 5th congressional district, which is predominantly Somali. The Congresswoman did not hesitate to employ the race card with accusations of racism against anyone who dared point out the outright theft and fraud perpetrated by members of her Somali community, as illustrated in the preceding paragraphs. It is a lesson that race hustlers like the Rev Al Sharpton never fail to accuse their opposition when or where there are some horrific examples of maleficence and/or criminal activity committed by so-called “People of Color”.
All “People of Color”, including WHITE PEOPLE, can commit fraud, stealing, murder, whatever, because we are all, or can be, “sinful creatures " at times. I was raised a Roman Catholic, and in the famous prayer, the Hail Mary, there is the line, or act of contrition if you will, which states, “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us SINNERS, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.” So please, everyone like Congresswoman Omar, Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Hakeem Jeffries, Maxine Waters, or Rashida Tlaib(D-MI) quit hurling the race-card BS for a change; and begin addressing the real problems endemic to their constituencies, that have little to nothing to do with race.
I have an idea!! Maybe Congresswoman Omar can hold a financial investment seminar for some of her constituents on how to increase their net worth from $ 174,000 a year to $30 million in less than six years. You go, girl!
"Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of knowing what not to believe.”
Euripides
We should have learned that lesson in the 1960s, with the Great Society Programs and the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, which gave rise to Community Services Block Grants. These were all authored during the Johnson Administration. These Programs were at the heart of the so-called War on Poverty, which saw billions of dollars administered by the Federal government to help the poor and downtrodden. Negroes/Blacks/African Americans were especially targeted in receiving the so-called benefits of these programs. It was a valiant attempt by the Feds to uplift the many within the Negro Community because of past discriminatory practices that hamstrung many Blacks or People of Color. At the local level, many of these programs were plagued by mismanagement, fraud, and outright theft of millions of taxpayers' dollars.
To put this in perspective, sixty-one years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society Programs launched the War on Poverty. Since then, taxpayers have spent more than $22 trillion fighting Johnson’s war. This was three times the cost of all military wars in U.S. history. Last year alone, taxpayers spent more than $970 billion on 87 different anti-poverty programs.
Despite this spending, the percentage of Americans living in poverty has remained relatively unchanged since the late 1960s. President Reagan once quipped that well-meaning individuals (both Democrats and Republicans) declared war on poverty, “and poverty won.”
Once more, a good portion of monies allocated to help the poor and specifically Black Americans, what the left calls “People of Color, “ just got stolen or badly mismanaged. The Community Service Block Grants (CSBG), which gave rise to Community Action Programs (CAP), were the most controversial component of the Great Society Programs. They proposed "maximum feasible participation" by poor people themselves to determine what would help them the most. Of course, in the succeeding decades, this would open the gates to a great deal of fraud and outright theft of these Federal funds, i.e., < taxpayers' dollars>. CAP represented a radical departure from the government’s traditional approach to running most social reform programs.
Some sad but typical examples
Black folks, along with a lot of white administrators, were able to steal and/or mismanage so much of the funding back in the late 1960s and beyond. CSBG, as well as CAP, were often the vehicle employed to garnish Federal funds and use them for questionable “make-work-programs, no-show-jobs, and dubious minority youth work programs. In upstate New York, in places like Rochester and Buffalo, Action for a Better Community Programs (ABC) were perhaps the most dreadfully mismanaged. In Buffalo, a youth work program employed Black youth to clean up vacant lots in the inner city. Over fifty years ago, as a young, idealistic college student, I was assigned, along with two others, to “supervise” work groups of 15 to 20 teenagers, mostly Black, in cleaning up the garbage in these vacant lots. At the beginning of the summer, things went ok. However, by the second or third week, most black youth didn’t show up for their work assignments.
However, what they showed up for every Friday was to collect a paycheck for jobs they hadn’t performed. This went on for the rest of the summer. Complaints filed with the Directors or urban site supervisors were basically ignored. It went on this way until the end of summer. My naïve and idealistic college-student colleagues and I knew what the score was. Very few of us ever worked in these youth work programs again.
Here is a tragic sidebar. I was told by more than one Urban site supervisor that these black youth came from poor families, and it was “ok” for them to show up and collect a check. I kid you not!
In my hometown of Rochester, New York, many of the urban youth work programs were equally suspect. Monies and work opportunities were being wasted. Tragically, all those hundreds, if not thousands of Black youths learned nothing regarding good work habits and taking responsibility for themselves and their communities.
And no! It is not racist to point this out, as many Progressive Liberals want to shame or intimidate many into believing. Too many Democrats, as well as many Conservative Americans, allow themselves to be trapped in the “racial/ethnic guilt cul-de-sac,” which teaches them the dodgy if not questionable lesson of “Kill and/or abuse me, but please don’t call me a Racist!”
What some Somalis have Learned
Kayseh Magan, an investigator in the Medicaid Fraud Division of the Office of the Minnesota Attorney General, and a Somali-American himself, once opined in an unguarded moment that members of his community must cease leveraging race and religion to avoid accountability. By now, most Americans have heard or read about the massive amount of outright fraud perpetrated by over 70 community services programs operated by Somali officials in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Here is a sidenote! The same phenomena have been observed among Somali communities in both the UK and the EU.
As a quick overview, over $9 billion in taxpayer dollars were stolen or defrauded by Somalis in various social services scams.
Somali Fraud #1.
During the Covid-era between $250-$300 million was stolen by 75 Somali defendants. It all revolved around a nonprofit group or program called “Feeding Our Future (FOF). FOF claimed work with restaurants and/or catering services to distribute meals to schools and nursing homes throughout the Minneapolis area. For several years, FOF submitted fraudulent meals and invoices, defrauding federal officials and taxpayers.
Somali Fraud #2
Beginning in early Fall and accelerating over the New Year's holiday, a fraudulent housing program was discovered. So far, over a dozen people have been charged with submitting millions of dollars' worth of fraudulent or inflated bills to the Federal Government. According to Federal prosecutors, Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher and other housing-stabilization programs were susceptible to fraud because they lowered barriers to entry, thereby favoring Somalis, who had few record-keeping requirements. Prosecutors note that spending on housing programs ballooned from $2.6 million to $100 million in less than three years. At the time of this writing, at least a dozen Somalis, including two Pennsylvanians with no clear connection to Minnesota, allegedly traveled in what Prosecuting attorneys described as “fraud tourism.”
Somali Fraud #3
Since early 2025, several Somalians have been charged with stealing state/Federal monies designated to provide services to children with autism. Defendants were accused of hiring “unqualified behavioral experts,” submitting false claims to the state that indicated they worked with autistic children. Prosecutors also said that payments ranging from $ 1,100 to $ 1,500 were made to thousands of persons (not verified). One autism services defendant, Asha Farhan Hassan, and staff were also charged with running a fake food distribution site.
Joseph H. Thompson, United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota, said the autism services fraud cases were not isolated schemes. So far, at least 14 Medicaid services are under audit that were previously deemed “high risk for fraud.”
Somali Fraud #4
Nick Shirley, an independent investigator and YouTuber, drew over ten million viewers in late 2025. His reporting or videos showed him visiting federally supported child care centers in Minneapolis and finding no children present. He pointed out that more than a dozen day care centers were not providing any services. These Somali owners had been pocketing the Federal funding/taxpayers' money for years. Currently, the United States Department of Health and Human Services has frozen roughly $185 million in taxpayers' support for child care. An important aspect of the Somali Daycare case is that the defendants spent taxpayer funds on cars, property, and luxury travel. The FBI, along with the DOJ, also shows that millions of stolen funds were wired to banks and companies in China. As noted by several members of the International Trade Commission, tracing or locating all funds stolen money attributable to the CCP is an investigative “black hole.” Somali defendants also transferred nearly $4 million to accounts in Kenya as well as a questionable banking institution in Somalia, which, according to officials at both the CIA and the Department of War, has close relations to al Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab. The United States Department of War has for years designated al-Shabaab a foreign terrorist militia based in Somalia.
Have we been Omar(ed) ?
I imagine one can also pose the question, have we been Sharpton(ed), Waters(ed), or even Benjamin Crump(ed) again? This time, by Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who represents the 5th congressional district, which is predominantly Somali. The Congresswoman did not hesitate to employ the race card with accusations of racism against anyone who dared point out the outright theft and fraud perpetrated by members of her Somali community, as illustrated in the preceding paragraphs. It is a lesson that race hustlers like the Rev Al Sharpton never fail to accuse their opposition when or where there are some horrific examples of maleficence and/or criminal activity committed by so-called “People of Color”.
All “People of Color”, including WHITE PEOPLE, can commit fraud, stealing, murder, whatever, because we are all, or can be, “sinful creatures " at times. I was raised a Roman Catholic, and in the famous prayer, the Hail Mary, there is the line, or act of contrition if you will, which states, “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us SINNERS, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.” So please, everyone like Congresswoman Omar, Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Hakeem Jeffries, Maxine Waters, or Rashida Tlaib(D-MI) quit hurling the race-card BS for a change; and begin addressing the real problems endemic to their constituencies, that have little to nothing to do with race.
I have an idea!! Maybe Congresswoman Omar can hold a financial investment seminar for some of her constituents on how to increase their net worth from $ 174,000 a year to $30 million in less than six years. You go, girl!
Patrick Hall is a retired University Library Director. He graduated from Canisius College and the University of Washington, where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology, and Library and Information Science. Mr. Hall has also completed additional coursework at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University, and St. John Fishers College of Rochester, New York. He has been published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, National Catholic Reporter, Freedom's Journal Magazine, and American Libraries. He has published in peer-reviewed publications, the Journal of Academic Librarianship, and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014, he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.
Posted in Opinion
Posted in Patrick Hall, Great Society, Economic Opportunity Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson, the poor, Government largess, work programs, Black youth, progressives, Conservatives, #Somalis, racists, fraud, #Ilhan Omar (D-MN), White People, #people of Color, #freedomsjournalmagazine, Freedoms Journal Institute
Posted in Patrick Hall, Great Society, Economic Opportunity Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson, the poor, Government largess, work programs, Black youth, progressives, Conservatives, #Somalis, racists, fraud, #Ilhan Omar (D-MN), White People, #people of Color, #freedomsjournalmagazine, Freedoms Journal Institute
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